


Going Away

by Albion19



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-05
Updated: 2014-04-05
Packaged: 2018-01-18 06:39:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1418642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Albion19/pseuds/Albion19
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter banishes Wendy but promises to return...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going Away

“I’ll be back for you tomorrow night.”

It was half a threat, half a dark promise and by the stricken look on her face she took it as such.  He flew away with a smirk on his teasing mouth because he would not be back that next night. Oh no he would leave her to stew, to let the sting of her banishment and the heat of her reproach for him cool. He would wait until she missed him, until her longing for him became so great that her cries would echo through Neverland in her dreams.

A week, or even a month, should do it.

* * *

 

Time in Neverland is a funny thing. Well actually it isn’t a thing at all. There is no time to be found on the island or in the teeming seas. Everything existed in a state of _now_ , with the past looping back into the present like a bow. However bows are made to be unravelled and Peter would often pluck at the ends and tie them back together again.

It was a very confusing place.

However in the clear and vast space that was his mind – a mind that flashed and whirled with cruel impulses and snippets of old conversations and dreams – only one thing was constant: Wendy Darling. She twinkled like the stars that were the doorways to her home: high up and always there. He could feel her gaze on them, they winked when she did.

He measured time by the passing of adventures and the dances around the bonfire but when he came home wet or speckled in strange blood and the start of the day was as insubstantial as smoke he knew that he could not take it anymore. Wendy Darling was stable, she was constant and real but in the end the apotheosis to him in every way and yet his echoey mind would swoop back to her and his heart – small, black and searing – would ignite at the thought of her.

He could grasp firmly onto only two things in his mind, two things that did not fade away with the timelessness of his existence; Neverland and Wendy Darling and that was for one simple reason.

They were his.

* * *

 

He flies back to London after two days. Would it be long enough for her disappointment to fade? Probably not but he was imbued at that moment with a magnanimous sense of selflessness and he would prove to Wendy that everything she had dreamed of, everything he had filled her mind with, could come true.

He would teach her to fly and they would go on adventures. In the quest to save his own life he had forgotten the very reason why: to remain in a perpetual stare of carelessness, to have fun and think nothing of others. That had been her problem, why she had stuck into the skin of Neverland like a thorn, into his skin and nothing he did could get her out.

It was raining and in the distance a clock bell was striking. Oh how he detested the sound of clocks; so persistent, so infallible, so unwanted. There are no clocks in Neverland, no calendars or birthdays or anniversaries. Everyday could be whatever they wanted so what was the point in recording it? As he ruminated the futility of time he came upon the Darling household and landed on the roof. If he found anything about the city strange or peculiar he gave no indication. His mind was solely fixed on Wendy, like an arrow point to a target.

He forced the doors open – half wondering why they were not left open for him – and alighted on the floor of the nursery. Draped covered furniture stood like conspicuous ghosts around him, still and strangely sad in the breathless silence. He went to Wendy’s bed – it was her bed, he was sure – and pulled the white sheet away. Nothing, not even a mattress. He stared at the coiled springs with something very close to hate.

“Wendy?”

“I’m afraid you’ve missed her,” a quivering voice said and Peter looked up as an old man came tottering into the room. He was small, white haired and using a walking stick. He was very old indeed. Peter fought to impulse to kick the stick away.

“What?”

“Yes, she left this morning,” he said distractedly, rheumy eyes looking around the room through thick lensed spectacles. Peter shied away as the man came a little too close. Peter was not afraid of anything but he viewed the truly elderly with a weary disgust. He found the old man repellent and imagined that he could smell the death on him and wondered madly for a second if it was catching. He had to get away.

“She left? Where?” he asked in disbelief. He had promised her that he would return and he _never_  breaks a promise. Why would she leave, why would she go on holiday, of all things, when he was coming for her?

“Oh you know, to that place.”

“What place?!” he wanted to strangle the answer out of the old fool but didn’t want touch him.

“The place she always dreamed of.”

“Neverland?”

“That’s it!” the old man said excitedly and looked at Peter keenly, as if seeing him for the first time. Something in his gaze seemed to shift, an awareness that had not been there before but just as quickly it is came it left. He fiddled with a watch on his wrist, one that Peter saw was broken, and then looked up at Peter as if he had just seen him. “Oh hello…you’re late, I’m afraid you missed it.”

“Missed  _what_? Are you  _insane_  old man?”

But the old man did not answer, too busy buttoning up his dark blazer and straightening his tie. He mumbled and Peter strained to hear. “She usually did these blasted things for me,” he sighed and looked into a sheet covered mirror. Peter smirked because the man had clearly lost his marbles. And they question why he never wanted to grow old?

The old man drifted from the disbanded nursery and down a staircase. Peter followed reluctantly, collecting memories along the way. Once he and Wendy had tiptoed through the house at night and he has stolen kisses from her. Strange but now that seemed an age ago. He stopped as the man stepped into the living room. Once the room had been lit with candles and gas lamps but now electric bulbs lit the room dimly as a fire flickered gently behind a grate. Flowers were everywhere, Peter smelt them before he saw them and the scent was heavy and intoxicating. Waxy day lilies and white carnations where clumped in vases or laid out in wreathes around the room and Peter plucked at petals as he passed. He hated white lilies, he found them phoney.

“I hate these bloody flowers,” the man said, echoing his own distaste, as he took a handkerchief and mopped at his streaming eyes. He took a seat in an armchair, which was beside another, and lifted a shoebox onto his lap. He leafed through it, apparently forgetting that Peter was there until he spoke up.

“She spoke about you often,” he said in a quiet, lucid voice. Peter turned from inspecting his dark reflection in the blank television screen and looked at the man with a bored expression that shifted into a smirk.

“I’m sure she does.”

“She often wondered when you would return…”

“Well here I am,” Peter spread his arms wide, as if waiting for Wendy to enter them, but no one came. The old man, Peter and cloying flowers remained in a hush, the quiet only broken by the tick of a clock. The old man looked up from leafing through the shoebox and stared at Peter with the same knowing look he had worn earlier.

“You really haven’t aged a day, have you? I thought it was all poppycock but I believe, I believe now. Tinkerbell, Captain Hook and everyone else, it’s all real like she said.”

“Who?” Peter asked. The names tugged at him, like something from a half remembered dream but the tug was not strong enough for him to care. The old man sighed with regret and looked at a picture on the mantelpiece. It was only then that Peter realised that photographs were dotted around the room, they had been hidden behind the flowers.

He approached a large, silver framed picture warily, like a man approaching a crouching tiger, before he snatched it up in his hands. It was a black and white photograph of a wedding, the bride and groom standing on the steps of a church as petals fluttered around them frozen in time. Peter half loved, half hated photographs, they were a pristine example of timelessness but also a horrible testimony of the passing of it. He stared and stared at the bride, stared until his eyes started to sting and water and he squeezed them shut.

“She wore a pink satin sash…beautiful…she told me later, much later that she stood at the window in her dress and opened her arms for you but you never came. I was jealous of you,” he admitted with a tired laugh and Peter rounded on him, the picture held tightly in his hands.

“Where is she?!”

But again the old man’s mind seemed to have filled with the fog of yesteryear. He riffled though the box, muttering to himself as he pulled out old letters and postcards. The sound of splintering glass made him look up sharply and stare at Peter. Blood dripped from the boy’s hands, the glass shattered under his shaking fingers. He breathed quickly, his face twisted into an almost demonic look of rage.

“If I could suck in all the air in here so you’d die I would.”

The old man laughed. “Yes she said you were a monster,” he said, not the least bit afraid and finally pulled out a letter with a sigh. “Here it is.” He looked up at Peter, contemplating and the dazed look in his eyes cleared and was replaced with a terrible grief. “She asked me to give this to you, if you ever turned up.”

“It’s been two days,” Peter said and his voice was small and almost pleading.

“She was 101 when she died. A respectable age. Look, here is the letter the Queen wrote to her last year,” he said proudly and now distracted with the past Peter took the other letter offered to him out of the old man’s fingers. The envelop was addressed to him, in Wendy’s handwriting but it was more…established, sure of itself. He looked around the room, pressing the letter to his chest and his eyes were drawn to the pictures.

He had not recognised Wendy as a bride, had not wanted to but now he saw her everywhere. He saw a sullen looking teenager, maybe only a few months older than the girl he knew. He felt a sudden red hot lust and quickly put the picture down. He saw a twenty something Wendy sitting in a park, looking radiant, smiling into the camera. He saw Wendy with a man, always the same man and he was filled with an intense loathing, even as a part of him contemplated that the man looked similar to him. He pressed a bloody fingerprint over every picture of the man he saw.

Once the pictures changed, once children and grandchildren popped up and crowded around a gradually aging Wendy, Peter could not bring himself to look at anymore. The last was of a tiny looking elderly woman, her white softly curling hair coiled into a bun and though she was old her dark green eyes were bright and sharp. She was a handsome woman in her dwindling years, he could admit it but the yawning, lacerating pain drowned out any good feelings he had.

He was too late. She had waited for him, she had waited and waited but he had never come. Peter dropped the broken picture and backed away from the dazed old man – Wendy’s husband, Wendy’s widower – until his back hit the wall. He clutched the bloody envelop in his hand and the man looked up in surprise.

“Who are you?”

“I’m…I’m Peter.”

The man smiled dreamily. “So am I,” he sighed and began to shake his head in anxious confusion. “You’ve just missed her. She’s going away for a while but she’ll be back…”

Peter stumbled from the room, mind whirling around like a mad dog chasing its tail and ran from the house onto the street. He ran and ran and you would be right to wonder why he did not just fly. The truth is he had forgotten and once you forget you can never do it again. He ended up in some park, he couldn’t tell you which, and finally found the courage to open the letter and read as the sun sank.

_Dearest Peter,_

_When you read this it is likely that I will be gone. You see I am going away and I’m afraid it’s not a place either of us are familiar with. And yet I hope that maybe it is closer to you than either of us dream._

_I have grown old, I am sorry, but I have. I tried not to, I really did but I have and it is only now that I regret it.  I waited and waited for you, I thought that when I married you would finally stop teasing me and come but you never did. I think it is unlikely that we will meet again but that is a terribly reasonable thought and we both know how much you detest reason. So I have hope that I will see you again, before the end and you will finally teach me to fly like you promised. You never break a promise, do you?_

_Please hurry Peter._

_Yours for always,_

_Wendy._


End file.
